Pirate Bay Unveils Beta Video Bay

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Tums for copyright lawyers

STOCKHOLM — The legally embattled operators of the Pirate Bay keep sailing the tech seas, unveiling a new video streaming site The Video Bay.

According to TorrentFreak, the site was created to share video clips, not unlike YouTube, but also plans to, unsurprisingly, circumvent copyright issues and restrictions.

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"This will be an experimental playground and, as such, subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly," it says on the current home page.

In development for two years, the site is currently in an "extreme beta" version, as the operators call it, and the main page says, "Don't expect anything to work at all."

Though visitors were reportedly able to browse through videos at first, that feature is currently disabled. Sample video clips, many appearing to be music videos, are on the site right now.

It's also said the site will be censor-free, which could open the door to plenty of adult content (not that one can't find that now on numerous porn tube sites).

It's unknown when the site will officially go live.

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde said, "It will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five."

As Gizmodo notes, the Video Bay will employ new tech such as HTML 5 features for video and audio tags and the embedding of Ogg/Theora video and audio formats. And it will not use P2P technology to stream the videos.

The site can only be used with a Web browser that supports the HTML 5 tags, such as Firefox 3.5 beta 4 or the actual update due this week, Safari 3.4/Safari 4, Opera 9.52 preview, and Google Chrome 3.